When I worked for Major Bank, one of the biggest rules we had was that we were not allowed to look up our own accounts on "employee" systems (the mainframe and other systems that employees used to work with customer accounts). We were allowed to use the internet to go to the online banking site, like any other customer, but we were not to use employee systems as a customer (does that make any sense?). The whole reason was to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. We had the power to reverse transactions, move money around, do bank originated credits and debits and all that fun stuff, so to mess with your own accounts could look very, very bad. Also, every movement you make on the computers is tracked, so it would seem obvious that you would get caught in fairly short order. Anyway, one of my coworkers regularly broke this rule. He wasn't doing anything "bad", just balancing his checkbook and such, but still, we'd all been given dire warnings about the consequences of such actions (immediate termination). Of course, CW was caught and just couldn't understand why he was being let go.

Oh, yes! There was a bank employee/IT/programmer some years ago who discovered a wonderful way to increase his own balance without anybody noticing it. When a bank figures interest on savings accounts and CDs, it often comes out to fractions of a cent. Something like $2.2894, instead of a simple $2.28. In the past, the bank just rounded the amount down that they gave to a client and held onto the extra fraction of a cent. IT Guy told the computer to divert it to his account. The bank's clients never missed it, because they never saw it in the first place. The bank didn't miss it, at least initially. This was a large bank chain with many clients, and those fractions of a cent piled up to several thousand dollars a month going into IT Guy's account. I regret to say that I don't remember how he got caught. An audit, maybe.

I believe that was part of the plot of Superman 3. Richard Pryor's character does the same thing. He gets caught when he turns up for work in a red sports car...

I once called in to go shopping. Yep, you read that correctly. Shopping. There was a SPECTACULAR sale going on at this mall about 45 minutes from where I live and I really wanted to go.

My boss was pretty awesome about it though. She thought it was the most interesting reason she was ever given and besides she had way over schedule payroll hours that day. Granted, she did ask me to pick her up a pair of specific, hard to find, shoes if I came across them.

She was probably glad you were honest with her, too.

Dark Sister skipped a day in high school to go hunting with Dark Father. When she showed up and told them why, they gave her detention. That's what telling the truth gets you, I guess.

No, that's what truancy gets you.

Oh, so she and my father should have lied about where she was so that she wouldn't get detention? They could have said, "She was feeling ill this morning," and the school wouldn't have given her detention. Instead, they told the school where she really was and she got detention. Ergo, lying would have not gotten her into trouble and not lying got her into trouble, thus "Telling the truth gets you detention."

Well, yes. That's a little like saying "I could have said that I didn't steal the money, and not gotten into trouble . So clearly, I'm being arrested for telling the truth, when I told the police yes, I took it. What an unjust legal system!"

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My cousin's memoir of love and loneliness while raising a child with multiple disabilities will be out on Amazon soon! Know the Night, by Maria Mutch, has been called "full of hope, light, and companionship for surviving the small hours of the night."

At my school, if my parents called in an absence for whatever reason, it was fine up until the point where I was violating attendance rules. Why didn't they just call in ahead of time and have dad explain that he was taking her out of school for the day? Does no one go on vacations without getting detention for not being in school?

I fully understood the point and was reiterating my own, which is that she could have stayed out of trouble by lying. I was neither condoning skipping school nor saying that what the school did was unjust. If you look at the post I quoted and what I said before I related the story about my sister, I clearly said that telling the truth was a good thing and that the boss probably appreciated the honesty.

I then related a story on the opposite side of the spectrum, where instead of being appreciated, telling the truth actually got someone into trouble when lying would have kept that person out of trouble. My comment at the end was mockery of the situation in which telling the truth got someone into trouble when it usually does the opposite.

Twik, that's not like saying that at all. My sister wasn't getting detention for telling the truth, she obviously got it from not being out of school for a certified reason. The point I was making, was that regardless of the circumstances, telling the truth caused her to get "caught". Using your example, that would be saying, "I could have said that I didn't steal the money, and not gotten into trouble, but they caught me because I told the truth."

Yep. There are plenty of families around here who regularly get pulled into the court system for persistent truancy. In a lot of cases, the parents are home with the kids all day, but they say they can't make their kids go to school, so the kids don't go. A particular problem is parents who "can't" make their kids go to school, and they're tried of getting in trouble with the truancy officers, so they withdraw the kids from public school and declare themselves a "home school." (It's a pretty easy process here.) In our state, home schools are regularly reviewed/visited by local reps from a state board. The "can't make their kids go to school" families have no curriculum or lesson plan or anything, in a lot of cases, the kids are found to be playing video games all day. It's a double whammy because the kids aren't getting an education and it makes life that much harder for the people who are running legitimate home schools and working hard to make sure their kids are getting an education.

Oh, you've met my former SIL, then?

I don't think she got in any trouble over it, more's the pity. Our system must be more lax than yours.

I know a woman like this who is "home schooling" her daughter. What she really did was haul her out of school to take care of her younger brothers. Poor girl is nearly 14 and reads on a 3rd grade level. NO schooling is happening, she's just raising babies.

Ugh. That just makes me so sad. And I hate that those are the sort of cases that a lot of people around my area think of first when they think, "homeschooled."

Unfortunately, this poor girl is probably receiving the training she needs for her future: Cooking, cleaning, taking care of babies. Some sweet-talkin' guy will come along and take her away from her miserable home life where she feels unappreciated. Then she'll get pregnant (How did that happen?) and spend the rest of her life cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children.

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"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

At my school, if my parents called in an absence for whatever reason, it was fine up until the point where I was violating attendance rules. Why didn't they just call in ahead of time and have dad explain that he was taking her out of school for the day? Does no one go on vacations without getting detention for not being in school?

Since NCLB was passed - no you don't go on vacation during the school year without being punished. AYP counts absences against the school. Miss AYP 2x for the same reason and the feds start a take over of your school. So if it isn't a legal excused absence according to state law the district will often lower the boom in school. Truancy laws are pretty cut and dried and the schools can't say Sally can go hunting with Dad, but Johnny is playing hooky. Unexcused is unexcused X unexcused absences and the school is required by law to send the information to the truancy court.

Also to avoid AYP penalties our district will withdraw you if you miss a certain number of days in a row without contacting the school/answering our attempts to contact the parents. (I think it is either 5 or 10) We have people disappear regularly at breaks without withdrawing and then not enroll in another school till after the next break. (example families disappear from Thanksgiving till after winter break. When we ask the younger kids where they were they will tell us Mexico) It also happens between Spring break and Easter weekend.

When we have parents come to us and say "We have a family emergency and have to go to (Mexico, Romania, another state) for a week." They are encouraged to withdraw and reenroll when they get back.

I taught for most of a decade before the kids medical needs became overwhelming. I often forget that "regular" people don't know the alphabet soup of education. I do the same thing with the alphabet soup of the banking world, from my time with Major Bank. Sometimes it's easy to forget that regular people don't have any reason to know these things.

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Some people lift weights. I lift measures. It's a far more esoteric workout. - (Quoted from a personal friend)